TOEFL Complete the Words 2026: Reading Task 1 Vocabulary Drill, Letter-Pattern Rules, and 12 Annotated Practice Examples
Complete the Words is the very first thing you see on the new 2026 TOEFL Reading section. ETS engineered it as a low-friction warm-up: a single 70-word paragraph, ten missing-letter completions, one timer shared with the rest of the Reading section. The trap is that most candidates treat it like a warm-up and lose three or four easy points by guessing without reading the paragraph first, mis-typing a single letter inside a long suffix, or burning two minutes on a single word and then crashing into the Academic Passage with no time to spare. This guide is the playbook for getting all ten right in under 70 seconds: how the task is built, the eight letter-pattern rules that handle most items on autopilot, twelve annotated examples drawn from typical TOEFL paragraphs, and a two-week vocabulary plan that closes the gap if your spelling muscle is rusty.
1. What the Complete the Words task actually looks like
Complete the Words is officially Reading Task 1 in the redesigned 2026 TOEFL iBT. The 2026 redesign cut the old 700-word academic passages and replaced them with three shorter task types: this missing-letter vocabulary drill, a Read in Daily Life task built around emails and notices, and a 200-word Read an Academic Passage task. Complete the Words is always the first task you see — partly to ease test takers in, partly to feed early-difficulty signal into the adaptive routing engine that decides which second module you get sent to. For the full picture of the redesign, our 2026 format changes guide walks through every section.
On screen, you see a single short academic paragraph of about 70 words, displayed in a single column. Inside that paragraph, ten content words have been replaced with a "stem + box" pattern: the first three to five letters of the word are visible, followed by a small inline text input where you type the missing letters. The paragraph still reads as continuous prose; the boxes are inline, not in a separate answer column. There is no drag-and-drop, no multiple choice, no word bank to pick from. You read what is there, type what is missing, and move on.
The framing is deliberately low-stakes. Topics are accessible academic subjects — a paragraph about migration patterns, photosynthesis, urban planning, classical music history — written at a vocabulary level that any candidate prepared for the rest of the test should clear. The challenge is not understanding the topic. It is producing the right letters in the right order, fast, while three other Reading task types are still waiting on the same shared clock.
2. The mechanics: 70 words, 10 blanks, 1 paragraph
The numbers below define the constraint. Internalize them before any content prep — most lost points trace back to mis-pacing one of these.
| Constraint | Value | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Paragraph length | ~70 words | Short enough to read once at full speed before answering. The single biggest pacing hack on this task is using that first read. |
| Missing words per paragraph | 10 | All inside the paragraph as inline blanks. Only second/third sentences carry blanks; the first sentence is always intact and frames the topic. |
| Visible stem | 3-5 letters | Enough to identify the word family in most cases. Always read the stem first — it is more diagnostic than the surrounding context. |
| Time per item (target) | ~7 seconds | After the paragraph read-through. If you are over 12 seconds on a single blank, mark it for return and move on. |
| Time per paragraph (target) | ~70 seconds | Read-through (~15s) + 10 completions at 5-7s each + 5s buffer for review. Anything over 90s is eating Academic Passage time later. |
One non-obvious mechanic: the input boxes accept exact letter sequences only. There is no autocomplete, no spell check, no suggestion. If you type "ocurence" instead of "occurrence", the item scores zero — the rubric is binary per blank. American spelling is the default convention, so "analyze" not "analyse", "color" not "colour". Most of the high-frequency spelling traps are listed in section 8.
One other constraint worth knowing: blanks never appear in the very first sentence of the paragraph. ETS uses sentence one to give you the topic and the register, knowing that without that anchor the task collapses into pure pattern-matching. Read sentence one with attention; skim sentences two and three on the first pass to catch the topic shifts.
3. How scoring works and how many items you'll see
Each missing-letter completion is one scored item, marked correct or incorrect with no partial credit. The 10 items per paragraph all carry the same weight, regardless of whether you completed a four-letter suffix or a single missing letter. That symmetry is the most actionable scoring fact of this task: the easy items are worth exactly the same as the hard ones, so the highest-leverage move is securing every easy blank before sweating the harder ones.
How many paragraphs you see depends on the adaptive routing. The Reading section opens with a routing module of about 10-12 minutes that contains all three task types — Complete the Words, Read in Daily Life, and Read an Academic Passage. Based on your performance in the routing module, you are sent to either the easy or hard second module. The easy module skews heavily toward Complete the Words and Read in Daily Life; the hard module skews toward Academic Passage but still includes Complete the Words items. Difficulty of Complete the Words items is consistent across all three modules — only the volume changes. For more on how the routing engine decides where to send you, see our adaptive test guide.
In practice, most candidates encounter two to three Complete the Words paragraphs across a full Reading section, for 20 to 30 individual scored items. That makes this task one of the highest-volume single scoring blocks anywhere on the TOEFL Reading section. A candidate who consistently hits 9 out of 10 on Complete the Words is banking 18-27 raw items toward their Reading band; a candidate who hits 6 out of 10 is leaving 6-12 raw items on the table. The arithmetic alone justifies giving this task a dedicated week of focused prep, which is what section 9 maps out.
4. The 4 word categories that get blanked out
The blanks are not random. ETS draws from four predictable word categories, in roughly this proportion. Knowing the distribution lets you anticipate what is missing before you even read the surrounding clause.
Category 1 · Suffix-bearing nouns and adjectives (~45% of blanks)
Words ending in -tion, -sion, -ment, -ity, -ence, -ance, -ous, -ive, -ical, -able, -ible. The visible stem usually shows the root, and you supply the suffix. Examples: solution, argument, activity, dependence, obvious.
High-leverage zone: if you can identify which suffix family fits, the spelling is usually deterministic from the rules in section 5.
Category 2 · Verb forms with predictable inflections (~25% of blanks)
Verbs in tensed forms: -ed past tense, -ing progressive, -es third person, -ate / -ize / -ify causatives. Examples: described, analyzing, includes, demonstrate.
Watch for silent-e drops (analyze + ing → analyzing, not analyzeing) and consonant doublings (commit + ed → committed).
Category 3 · Academic-word-family content words (~20% of blanks)
Words from the Coxhead Academic Word List, often two or more syllables: theory, evidence, analysis, hypothesis, principle, structure, function, factor, process, concept. The stem often shows the first half: theory, evidence, hypothesis.
If you have done any AWL drilling, this category is essentially free points.
Category 4 · High-frequency descriptive content words (~10% of blanks)
Common nouns and adjectives that fit the topic: century, region, growth, decline, distance, surface, weather, climate, knowledge, modern. The stem usually leaves only 2-3 letters missing: century, growth, surface.
These are the easiest blanks if your reading vocabulary is solid. Get them all right before slowing down on Categories 1-3.
The implication for prep: ~70% of all Complete the Words blanks come from Categories 1 and 2, both of which are dominated by suffix patterns. Memorizing eight suffix rules covers more of the task than any single piece of vocabulary memorization, which is why the next section leads with patterns, not word lists.
5. The 8 letter-pattern rules that solve 90% of items
These eight rules cover about 90% of the items on a typical Complete the Words paragraph. Memorize them as a fixed checklist; on test day, run the checklist mentally as you scan the stem.
Rule 1 · -tion vs -sion (noun suffix)
-tion after a vowel: creation, position. -sion after consonants like n, l, r with stem ending in d or se: decision, conclusion, expansion.
Rule 2 · -ence vs -ance (noun suffix)
-ence after roots ending in soft c/g or words derived from -ent adjectives: independence, evidence, difference. -ance after roots from -ant adjectives: importance, resistance, distance.
Rule 3 · -able vs -ible (adjective suffix)
-able after complete English words and after hard c/g: acceptable, noticeable, remarkable. -ible after Latin roots: possible, visible, terrible.
Rule 4 · -ous after vowel-bearing roots
Most stems ending in -i or -e take -ous: various, famous, numerous, obvious. Watch the e-drop in "famous" (not "fameous") — the silent e is dropped before -ous.
Rule 5 · -ical vs -ic (adjective suffix)
-ical when the noun ends in -y or there is an -ical/-ic noun-adjective pair: historical, biological, physical. -ic when no -al partner exists: academic, scientific, specific.
Rule 6 · Past tense -ed with consonant doubling
CVC pattern at the end of a stressed syllable doubles the final consonant before -ed: committed, referred, transferred. Stems already ending in two consonants do not double: worked, passed.
Rule 7 · Silent-e drop before vowel suffixes
Stems ending in silent -e drop the e before a vowel-starting suffix: analyze + ing → analyzing; describe + ed → described; create + ion → creation. Keep the e before consonant suffixes: require + ment → requirement.
Rule 8 · -y to -ies / -ied plural and past forms
Words ending in consonant-y change to -ies (plural) or -ied (past) and -ying (-ing): study → studies; identify → identified; apply → applying (no change before -ing).
You will notice that the eight rules cluster around three structural decisions: which suffix family fits, whether to drop or double, and which Latin-versus-English origin governs the spelling. On test day, ask those three questions in that order. Most blanks resolve at question one or two; only Categories 3 and 4 (academic content words and high-frequency descriptors) need vocabulary recall beyond the rules.
6. The 70-second-per-paragraph pacing plan
Every Reading task on the 2026 TOEFL shares one timer. If you spend 110 seconds on a Complete the Words paragraph, you have effectively borrowed 40 seconds from your Academic Passage budget — which is the highest-value question type in the section. The 70-second target below is engineered to keep that budget intact even if you have to dwell on one or two harder blanks.
- 0-15sFull read-through. Read the paragraph at a normal pace. Do not type. Goal: lock the topic, register, and any signal words.
- 15-50sFirst-pass blanks. Hit the easy 7-8 blanks (Category 4 + obvious suffix patterns). Aim for 5 seconds each. Skip anything that takes more than 8 seconds.
- 50-65sSecond pass on hard blanks. Return to the 2-3 you skipped. Apply the suffix rules, narrow the family, commit a guess. Never leave a blank empty.
- 65-70sSpelling sweep. Glance at each typed answer for one obvious error: doubled consonants, silent letters, -ence vs -ance.
Two timing rules built into this skeleton. First, the read-through is non-negotiable. Skipping the read-through to "save time" is the single most common reason candidates miss Category 3 (academic content) blanks — those need the topical context of the whole paragraph, not the immediately surrounding words. Second, the second-pass return is what keeps a single hard blank from sinking the entire paragraph. If you camp on a difficult blank for 30 seconds, you are guaranteed to lose at least one easy blank later in the section.
The 70-second budget is conservative for the easy module and tight for the hard module. If your second module is the hard one, the Complete the Words paragraphs you do see are still solvable in 70 seconds — there are simply fewer of them. For the section-wide budget across all three Reading task types, see our full Reading section pacing guide.
7. 12 annotated practice examples
The twelve examples below are calibrated to the four word categories in section 4. Each shows the visible stem, the correct completion, and a brief annotation on which rule or category solves it. Try to predict the completion before reading the answer.
"The new solution reduced energy consumption by 30%."
"The team analyzed three centuries of weather records."
"The most striking evidence came from soil samples."
"Researchers identified numerous sub-species in the region."
"The historical record stretches back four centuries."
"The committee committed additional funding to the project."
"Two recent studies reached opposite conclusions."
"The activity levels of the colony peaked at noon."
"This position contradicts the older theory."
"The dominant theory held for nearly fifty years."
"The results were not yet acceptable to the review board."
"Surface temperatures rose by 1.2 degrees over the same century."
What none of these examples need: rare vocabulary, etymological knowledge, or special test tricks. Each one is solvable with one of the eight letter-pattern rules plus topical recall from a 70-word paragraph. If you missed three or more, the gap is most likely in your suffix-pattern recognition rather than your vocabulary breadth — start with the rules, not with a wordlist. For broader Reading-section context, our 2026 Reading strategy guide covers the other two task types in the same depth.
8. 9 spelling traps that quietly drain points
9. The 2-week vocabulary & spelling practice plan
This plan assumes you have at least one TOEFL-equivalent reading practice under your belt and a 2-week runway. If your overall reading baseline is low, follow the broader plan in our 4-week and 8-week TOEFL study plans first, then come back to this dedicated drill.
Week 1 — Pattern recognition (no full paragraphs yet)
- ✓Day 1-2: Memorize the eight suffix rules in section 5. Drill 20 stems per rule. Stop only when you can produce the suffix in under 2 seconds without thinking.
- ✓Day 3: Mixed suffix drill: 50 random stems, all eight rule families. Time yourself — target 90 seconds total.
- ✓Day 4-5: Drill the spelling traps in section 8. Write each trap pair five times. The motor memory matters more than the cognitive memory under timed conditions.
- ✓Day 6: Academic Word List sweep — 100 high-frequency AWL words. Cover Category 3 vocabulary recall.
- ✓Day 7: Rest. Re-read the rule list once before sleep.
Week 2 — Full paragraphs, timed conditions
- ✓Day 1-2: Three full Complete the Words paragraphs per day, untimed. Goal: 9/10 or higher on each. Self-grade against the rule list — diagnose every miss back to a specific rule failure.
- ✓Day 3-4: Three paragraphs per day, timed at 70 seconds each. Goal: 8/10 or higher under time pressure.
- ✓Day 5: Mixed Reading section — Complete the Words combined with Read in Daily Life and Academic Passage tasks under full Reading-section timing. The point is testing the budget transfer, not the individual task.
- ✓Day 6: One full TOEFL timed mock test on the same setup you'll use on test day.
- ✓Day 7: Light maintenance only — review missed items from the mock, no new drilling.
The biggest predictor of band-6 outcomes from this plan is rule-traceability. Every miss should map back to a specific failure mode: rule mis-application, vocabulary gap, or spelling slip. Untraceable misses ("I just blanked") almost always trace back to skipping the paragraph read-through under time pressure — fix that first, and the rest of the misses become diagnosable.
10. Test-day tactics for the first 3 minutes of Reading
Reading is the first section on the 2026 TOEFL, which means Complete the Words is literally the first thing you do after the tutorial screen. Your cognitive state at that moment is fresh but un-warmed, and the temptation to dive into typing without the read-through is highest here. The tactics below are designed for that specific opening window.
- 1Read the full paragraph before touching the keyboard. 15 seconds. Non-negotiable. The topic and register from the first sentence resolves about three of the ten blanks on its own.
- 2Type the easy blanks first. Category 4 (high-frequency content) and obvious Rule 1-2 suffix items. Don't go in left-to-right; go in confidence order.
- 3If a blank takes more than 8 seconds, mark it and move on. The interface lets you re-edit any blank before submitting the paragraph. Camping on one item is the single biggest pacing failure.
- 4Run the suffix-rule checklist mentally. Three questions in order: which suffix family fits, drop-or-double, English-or-Latin origin. Most blanks resolve at question one.
- 5Default to American spelling on every blank. Even one British-spelling miss costs a full item. If you write "behaviour" out of habit, retrain that specific word in week 1.
- 6Never submit with a blank still empty. Even a wild guess that follows a suffix rule is sometimes right. An empty blank is always wrong.
Complete the Words rewards process over flair. The candidates who hit 9 or 10 out of 10 reliably are not the most well-read in the room — they are the ones who read the paragraph first, applied the eight rules in order, never camped on a hard blank, and ran a 5-second spelling sweep before submitting. Trust the rules, stick to the timing, and let the easy items carry the paragraph.
11. FAQ
What is the Complete the Words task on the new TOEFL 2026 reading section?
Complete the Words is the first task in the redesigned TOEFL 2026 Reading section. You see one short academic paragraph of about 70 words. Ten of the words inside the paragraph have their second halves missing, with only the first few letters showing followed by a typed-in box. You read the paragraph and type the missing letters into each box so the words make sense in context. Each completion is one scored item, giving you 10 points worth of items per paragraph. The task tests vocabulary knowledge, contextual word recognition, and spelling all at once.
How long do I have for Complete the Words on the TOEFL 2026?
ETS does not give an item-level timer for this task; it shares the overall Reading section budget of roughly 18 to 27 minutes depending on your adaptive path. The practical pacing target is about 70 seconds per Complete the Words paragraph end to end, including the read-through and the 10 letter completions. Spending more than 90 seconds on a single paragraph almost always means leaving Read in Daily Life or Academic Passage items short on time later in the section. The fastest way to stay on pace is to read the paragraph once at full speed before typing anything.
How is Complete the Words scored on the TOEFL 2026?
Each missing-letter completion is scored as one item, binary correct or incorrect. Spelling has to be exactly right; partial credit does not exist. Items appear in both the routing module and the easy module of the Reading adaptive section, with consistent difficulty across modules. The hard module includes fewer Complete the Words items and more Academic Passage items, but you still see the task at every level. Because the items are short and uniformly scored, this task is one of the most reliable point sources in the section if you train spelling and pattern recognition together.
What kinds of words go missing in TOEFL Complete the Words?
The missing items are content words inside short academic paragraphs, mostly nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Function words like "the", "of", and "and" are usually shown intact and rarely become target items. The visible portion is typically the first 3 to 5 letters of the word, and the missing portion is usually the suffix or stem ending. Common targets include words with predictable suffixes (-tion, -ment, -ity, -ous, -ive, -ical, -ence), words from academic word families (analyse, theory, develop, evident), and high-frequency content words that the surrounding sentence strongly implies.
Does spelling have to be perfect on Complete the Words?
Yes. Each blank is scored as one binary item, so even a single wrong letter inside a long suffix counts as a full miss. American spelling conventions are the default (analyze rather than analyse, color rather than colour). Common spelling traps include doubled consonants (occurrence, accommodate), silent letters (knowledge, doubt), and the difference between -ence and -ance, -tion and -sion, -able and -ible. Memorizing the eight letter-pattern rules in this guide handles most of the predictable cases; weekly spelling drills handle the rest.
How many Complete the Words paragraphs appear on the TOEFL 2026?
The exact count varies by adaptive path, but most candidates see two to three paragraphs in the routing module, plus one to two more in the easy module if they get routed there. Each paragraph contains 10 missing words, so a typical test surfaces 30 to 40 individual completions across the section. That makes Complete the Words one of the highest-volume single-task scoring blocks on the entire TOEFL Reading section, and one of the most concentrated places to gain or lose points if your vocabulary recall is patchy.
What is the best strategy for TOEFL Complete the Words?
Read the whole 70-word paragraph at full speed before typing anything. The main idea, the topic, and the surrounding clauses do most of the disambiguation work for you, so the second pass through the paragraph is mostly mechanical. Then on the second pass, complete the easiest blanks first (the ones with strong collocational pull, like "a major theo___" or "an import___ factor"), and circle back to the harder ones. Use the eight letter-pattern rules in section 5 to narrow down the suffix family before you guess. Never leave a blank empty; spelling-attack a guess even on a hard one.
Is Complete the Words harder in the hard adaptive module?
No. The difficulty of Complete the Words items is consistent across the routing, easy, and hard modules. ETS uses the task as a stable difficulty anchor, which is why it appears in every adaptive path. What changes between modules is the mix: the hard module gives you more Academic Passage items and fewer Complete the Words paragraphs, while the easy module skews the other way. The implication is practical: every Complete the Words item is worth the same in raw scoring weight, regardless of whether you got routed to the easy or hard second module.
Complete the Words is the most coachable task in the entire 2026 TOEFL Reading section, because every constraint — fixed paragraph length, fixed blank count, deterministic spelling rubric, predictable suffix patterns — is something you can train against directly. Treat the ten blanks as ten independent point sources, not a single test of vocabulary breadth. Drill the eight rules until the suffix family fires automatically. Run the 70-second skeleton on every paragraph. Read first, type second, sweep third. By test day, the easy seven items should resolve before you have consciously decided what they are — that is the difference between a 7/10 and a 9/10 on the first task you'll see on test morning.
Practise Complete the Words under real conditions
Our free TOEFLMock Reading practice tests use the 2026 format — same 70-word paragraphs, same inline missing-letter inputs, same shared timer with the rest of the Reading section. Run one full Reading section before you book your test date and one more in the final week of your prep cycle to lock the pacing.
Start a Free Reading Practice TestTest preparation specialist and former classroom instructor. Designs full-length mock content aligned to the 2026 ETS redesign and writes section-strategy, study-plan, and rubric-decoded guides for every TOEFL task type.